AUSTIN — The mom of a Texas A&M cheerleader found dead after a football game has revealed that her daughter’s phone was on “Do Not Disturb” mode on the night of her death — which was “weird” for the teen.
College junior Brianna Aguilera, 19, was discovered dead outside an apartment complex around 1 a.m. Saturday after attending Friday’s UT vs Texas A&M tailgate in Austin.
Aguilera’s mom tried to contact her daughter hours before she learned of her death, she said.
“What was weird to me and skeptical was her phone was on Do Not Disturb. We always had this rule that if she was going to go out, she had to have her phone on ‘location on’ and answer her text to at least let me know she was OK,” Stephanie Rodriguez told KGNS.
“That stopped happening around 6 p.m.,” the mom from Laredo, Texas, said.
Rodriguez called the Austin Police Department after failing to get in touch with her daughter, but was told she couldn’t file a missing person’s report because it had been less than 24 hours, she claimed.
Her daughter’s phone was pinging by a creek, but cops reportedly told her they couldn’t check the scene, “which scared me the most, because all these murders have been coming out in Austin and bodies have been found in creeks,” Rodriguez said.
Aguilera’s phone was still in the same location on Saturday morning, Rodriguez said.
Her daughter’s body was found by a passerby later that day, and police finally called Rodriguez at 4 p.m. Saturday to let her know the body was in the morgue.
She was positively identified through fingerprint analysis.
Rodriguez has insisted her daughter was killed, after police reportedly told the family the death may have been accidental or suicide.
“This was not accidental. Someone killed my Brie and gave all the group of friends a lot of time to come up with the same story. My daughter would not jump 17 stories from a building, and to be labeling this as a suicide is insane. My daughter loved life and was excited to graduate and pursue her career in law,” Rodriguez wrote in a Facebook post on Monday.
Police told the grieving mom that her daughter’s autopsy was performed on Sunday, with results still pending as of Monday, Rodriguez said.
On Monday, the family traveled from Laredo to Austin to speak with the lead investigator on the case.
“I asked and demanded for another detective to be assigned to the case, and they said no. They even told me their geometric system was broken. That they were eyeballing the distance where my daughter fell which is the 18th floor, down to her death,” Rodriguez said.
She claimed police had provided her with little information about who was with Aguilera when she died, and hadn’t gone into the apartment or questioned anyone in the building.
“They told me that they saw a group of friends going into the apartment and they saw a group of friends leaving but my daughter was not there,” Rodriguez said.
“They interviewed the girls that were with her in the apartment. But they interviewed them a whole day later. They interviewed them at 1 p.m. that Saturday instead of investigating at the time of the scene,” she added.
Rodriguez believes one of the 15 people in the apartment at the time of her daughter’s death knows something.
“There was a fight that happened between my daughter and another girl, and they were all staying in the same apartment that I have actual text messages of, and the detective just disregarded them,” Rodriguez told KSAT.
Police have said their investigation into the teen’s death is ongoing.
“At this time, the incident is not being investigated as a homicide, and there are no indications of suspicious circumstances. The cause of death will be determined by the Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office,” a spokesperson for the Austin Police Department told The Post.
The Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
A GoFundMe to support Aguilera’s family has so far raised almost $20,000.”My daughter had such a beautiful impact on the community of Laredo. We were both born and raised in Laredo. She wanted to come back to practice law in Laredo,” Rodriguez said.
By ANTHONY BLAIR/New York Post
